Fallen Series 04 - Rapture (30 page)

Now it’s time for you to wake up.

The air before Luce seemed to sputter, turning from white to blurry gray. Then deep in the distance came the vision of Bill’s cackling face. His black wings spread wider than the sky, wider than a thousand galaxies, filling her mind, filling every crevice in the universe, engulfing Luce with infinite fury.

This time I will win.

His voice like shards of glass dragging across bare skin.

How close was he now?

Luce’s feet slammed into the mesa floor. The light was gone.

She fell to her knees, landing next to Dee, who had come to rest on her side, one arm slung out to cradle her head, her long red hair spilling out like blood. Her eyes were closed, her face serene, so unlike the face that had been haunting Luce for the past week. She tried to stand, but she felt clumsy.

Daniel dropped to his knees at her side. Sitting next to her on the Slab, he took her in his arms. The smell of his hair and the touch of his hands soothed her. He whispered, “I’m here, Luce, it’s okay.”

She didn’t want to tell him she kept seeing Bill. She wanted to go back to that light. She touched the thumbprint on her forehead and nothing happened. Dee’s blood was dry.

Daniel was staring at her, lips tight. He brushed the hair out of her eyes and pressed his palm to her forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“I’m fine.” She did feel feverish, but there was no time to worry about that. She staggered to her feet and looked up at the moon.

It was directly overhead, in the center of the sky. This was the moment Dee had told them to wait for, the moment her death would become worthwhile.

“Luce. Daniel.” Roland’s voice. “You’d better look at this.”

He held the goblet at an angle and was tipping the last of Dee’s blood into the depression at the base of the map. When Luce and Daniel filed in next to the others, the blood had already flowed into most of the marble’s broken lines. Though Dee had said that the Earth was different back at the time of the angels’ Fall, the map before them looked increasingly similar to a contemporary map of the Earth.

South America was nearer to bumping against Africa.

The northeast corner of North America nudged more closely to Europe, but mostly it was the same. There was the slip of water where the Gulf of Suez parted mainland Egypt from the Sinai Peninsula, and in the middle of the peninsula was the yellow stone marking the plateau where they were right now. To the north was the Medi-terranean, dimpled with a thousand tiny islands—and on the other side of its narrow belt, at the point where Asia reached for Europe, was a shallow pool of blood sharpening slowly into a star.

Luce heard Daniel swallow at her side. The angels all looked stupefied as Dee’s blood filled out the points of the star, indicating modern Turkey—more specifically—

“Troy,” Daniel said finally, shaking his head in amaze-ment. “Who would have guessed . . .”

“
There
 again,” Roland said, his tone conveying a tortured history with the city.

“I always got the sense that place was doomed.” Arriane shivered. “But I—”

“Never knew why,” Annabelle finished.

“Cam?” Daniel said, and the others looked away from the map to eye the demon.

“I’ll go,” Cam said quickly. “I’m fine.”

“Then that’s it,” Daniel said as if he couldn’t believe it. “Phillip,” he called, looking upward.

Phil and his three Outcasts rose from their perches on the cliff peaks overhead.

“Alert the others.”

What others? Who else was left by now?
 Luce thought.

“What will I tell them?” Phil asked.

“Tell them we know the site of the Fall, that we’re leaving now for Troy.”

“No.” Luce’s voice halted the Outcasts’ movement.

“We can’t leave yet. What about Dee?”

In the end, it was no surprise that Dee had taken care of everything, down to the details for her memorial. Annabelle found them tucked into a slat on the roof of the creaky wooden trunk, which, as Dee’s letter explained, flipped over to form a catafalque. The sun was low in the sky by the time they began to make her memorial. It was the end of the seventh day; Dee’s letter assured them this wouldn’t be a waste of their time.

Roland, Cam, and Daniel carried the catafalque to the center of the marble platform. They covered the map completely so that when the Scale descended there, they would see a funeral, not the site of the angels’ Fall.

Annabelle and Arriane carried Dee’s body behind the catafalque. They laid her carefully on its center, so that her heart was directly above the star of her blood. Luce remembered that Dee had said that sanctuaries were built on top of sanctuaries. Her body would form a sanctuary for the map it hid.

Cam draped Dee’s cloak over her body, but he left her face exposed to the sky. In her final resting place, Dee, their desideratum, looked small but mighty. She looked at peace. Luce wanted to believe Dee was wandering through dreams with Dr Otto.

“She wants Luce to be the one to bless her,” Annabelle read from the letter.

Daniel squeezed her hand, as if to say, 
Are you okay?

Luce had never done anything like this before. She waited to feel awkward, guilty for speaking at the funeral for someone she had slain, but in those emotions’ place sat a sense of honor and awe.

She stepped up to the catafalque. She gave herself a few moments to gather her thoughts.

“Dee was our desideratum,” she began. “But she was more than one desired thing.”

She took a breath and realized she wasn’t blessing just Dee, but also Gabbe and Molly, whose bodies were air—and Penn, whose funeral she couldn’t attend. It was all too much. Her vision swirled and the words vanished and all she knew was that Dee had smeared sacrificial blood on Luce’s forehead.

It was Dee’s gift to Luce.

You must remember how to dream what you already
 
know.

Blood thrummed at her temples. Her head and her heart were ablaze with heat, her hands icy as she wove them through Dee’s.

“Something’s happening.” Luce held her face in her hands, her hair spilling down around her. She closed her eyes and found bright white light on the backs of her eyelids.

“Luce—”

When she opened her eyes, the angels had flung off their cloaks and unfurled their wings. The mesa flooded with light. A great mass of Scale shrieked somewhere just above her.

“What’s happening?” She shielded her eyes.

“We need to hurry, Daniel,” Roland shouted from above. Had the other angels already alighted? What was the source of the light?

Daniel’s arms wrapped around her waist. He held her tightly. It felt good but she was still afraid.

“I’m here with you, Lucinda. I love you, no matter what.”

She knew that her feet were drifting from the ground, that her body was taking flight. She knew she was with Daniel. But she was barely aware of their transit through the burning sky, barely aware of anything beyond the strange new pulsing in her soul.

Somewhere along the way it started raining.

Raindrops pattered on Daniel’s wings. Thunder rolled in the sky before them. Lightning ripped through the night. Luce had been sleeping, or in a heavy state of something similar to sleep, because when the storm came, she stirred to a dreamy half-awareness.

The headwind was brutal and incessant, flattening Luce against Daniel’s body. The angels flew through it at a tremendous speed, every wingbeat thrusting them across whole cities, mountain ranges. They flew over clouds that looked like giant icebergs, passing them in the blink of an eye.

Luce didn’t know where they were or how long they’d been traveling. She didn’t feel like asking.

It was dark again. How much time remained? She couldn’t remember. Counting seemed impossible, though Luce had once loved to solve complex calculus proofs. She almost laughed at the thought of sitting at a wooden desk in calculus, chewing on an eraser next to twenty mortal kids. Had that ever really happened to her?

The temperature dropped. The rain intensified as the angels flew into a gale that stretched farther than her eye could see. Now the raindrops pelting Daniel’s wings sounded like hail hitting icy snow.

The weather came sideways and upward. Luce’s clothes were drenched. She felt hot one moment, frozen the next. Daniel’s hands, encircling her body, rubbed goose bumps from her arms. She watched water streaming off the toes of her black boots toward the ground, thousands of feet below.

Visions appeared in the darkness through the storm.

She saw Dee letting down red hair that swirled around her body. The old lady was whispering,
Break the curse.

Her hair became bloody tendrils, enclosing her like mummy wrap, then like a caterpillar’s cocoon . . . until the body became a massive column of thick and dripping blood.

Through the mist, a golden light grew brighter. Cam’s wings sharpened in the space between Luce’s feet and the speck of land she had been watching.

“Is this it?” Cam shouted through the wind.

“I don’t know,” Daniel said.

“How
will
we know?”

“We just will.”

“Daniel. The time—”

“Don’t rush me. We have to get her to the right place.”

“Is she asleep?”

“She’s feverish. I don’t know. Shhh.”

A grunt of frustration accompanied the fading of Cam’s glow back into the mist.

Luce’s eyelids flickered.
Was
she asleep? The sky did seem to be raining nightmares. Now she saw Miss Sophia, her black eyes gleaming in the light reflected from the raindrops. She raised her dagger, and her pearl bracelets rattled as she brought the knife into Luce’s heart.

Her words—
Trust is a careless pursuit
—echoed again and again in Luce’s mind until she wanted to scream.

Then the vision of Miss Sophia flickered and swirled, darkening into the gargoyle who Luce
had
trusted, so carelessly.

Little Bill, who’d posed as a friend, all the while hiding something vast and terrifying. Maybe that was what friendship was to the devil: love always tinged with evil.

The gargoyle’s body was a husk for forces darkly powerful inside.

In her vision, Bill bared rotten black fangs and exhaled clouds of rust. He roared, but silently, a silence that was worse than anything he ever could have said, because her imagination filled the void. He consumed her plane of vision as Lucifer, as Evil, as the End.

She snapped open her eyes. She clasped her hands over Daniel’s arms around her as they flew through the endless storm.

You’re not afraid,
she vowed silently in the rain. It was the hardest of the things she’d had to convince herself of on this journey.

When you face him again, you will not be afraid.

“Guys,” Arriane said, appearing on the right side of Daniel’s wings. “Look.”

The clouds thinned as they drove onward. Below them was a valley, a broad stretch of rocky farmland that met a narrow strait of sea on its west side. A huge wooden horse stood absurdly in the barren landscape, a monument to a shadowed past. Luce could make out stony ruins near the horse, a Roman theater, a contemporary parking lot.

The angels flew on. The valley spread out below, dark but for a single light in the distance: an electric lamp that shone through the window of a tiny hut in the center of the slope.

“Fly toward the house,” Daniel called to the others.

Luce had been watching a line of goats drift across the sodden fields, gathering in a grove of apricot trees.

Her stomach lurched as Daniel swooped suddenly down.

When they touched the ground, Luce and the angels were about a quarter of a mile from the white hut.

“Let’s go inside.” Daniel took her hand. “They’ll be waiting for us.”

Luce walked next to Daniel through the rain, her dark hair splayed across her face, her borrowed coat drenched with what felt like a thousand pounds of raindrops.

They were trudging up a winding muddy path when a large drop of water clung to Luce’s eyelashes and dripped inside her eye. When she rubbed it away and blinked, the Earth had utterly changed.

An image flashed before her eyes, a long-forgotten memory returning to life:

The wet ground beneath her feet had gone from green to singed black in one place, ashen gray in another.

The valley surrounding them was pocked with deep, smoking craters. Luce smelled carnage, roasted flesh and rot so thick and sharp it burned her nostrils and clung to the roof of her mouth. Craters sizzled, sounding like rattlesnakes, as she walked past. Dust—angel dust—was everywhere. It floated through the air, coated the ground and rocks, fell like snowflakes on her face.

Something silver was in her peripheral vision. It looked like broken pieces of a mirror, except that it was phosphorescent—shimmering, almost alive. Luce dropped Daniel’s hand, fell to her knees, and crawled along the muddy ground toward the broken silver glass.

She didn’t know why she did this. She only knew she had to touch it.

She reached for a large piece, groaning with the effort. She had her hand firmly around it—

And then she blinked and came up with nothing but a fistful of soft mud.

She looked up at Daniel, her eyes filled with tears.

“What’s happening?”

He glanced at Arriane. “Get Luce inside.” She felt her arms being lifted. “You’ll be okay, kiddo,” Arriane said. “Promise.”

The dark wood door of the hut opened and a warm light poured out from within. Peering out at the wet angels was the calm, collected face of Steven Filmore, Lu-ce’s favorite teacher from Shoreline.

“Glad you could make it,” Daniel said.

“Same to you.” Steven’s voice was steady and professorial, just as Luce remembered. Somehow it was reassuring.

“Is she all right?” Steven asked.

No. She was losing it.

“Yes.” Daniel’s confidence took Luce by surprise.

“What happened to her neck?”

“We ran into some Scale in Vienna.”

Luce was hallucinating. She was not all right. Trembling, she met Steven’s eyes. They were steady, comforting.